Tag Archives: Prospecting

Continuing on with the series on Leveling Professions. This time we’re going to look at one of the hottest professions the game has to offer – Jewelcrafting.

Jewelcrafting (or JC) is a somewhat odd profession because it completely changes what it does once you get halfway through with leveling it. Up to skill level 300 the profession crafts rings and necklaces, an occasional trinkets. Once you hit level 300 it switches your focus almost entirely over to gems with a few bits of jewelry left over. That trend continues on throughout the remaining expansions, though jewelry does crop up a bit more in Wrath and Cataclysm.

The purpose of these guides isn’t to actually tell you what to make, because you can already find that at the same source I go to when it’s time to level professions: WoW-Professions.com. You can click on this link to find their Jewelcrafting Leveling Guide.

Instead, I’m going to go through the leveling guide and give you the information that you don’t find at WoW-Professions. Things such as bottlenecks in crafting or materials, how I personally go about leveling them (where I deviate from their guides), and some things I like or dislike about the profession. I’ll also give a few tips on how I make gold with the profession, or ways that I might put it to use that aren’t apparent to everyone.

Getting Started: Materials
The first thing you need to know about Jewelcrafting is what type of materials you need to craft. Mining is your primary source. If you want to level a Jewelcrafter then you need to either make their other profession Mining so that they can provide their own mats, have another toon with Mining to feed them mats, or be prepared to spend thousands of gold on the auction house purchasing the ore or raw gems that you need.

There are two items that you’ll need to have with you in order to perform your Jewelcrafting services. First up is the Jeweler’s Kit which you need for basically everything you do with the profession, and second is the Simple Grinder which you’ll need once you reach skill level 300 and start cutting the gems.

Once you reach the Northrend level of Jewelcrafting you’ll also find that Alchemy can be a great benefit for leveling up your Jewelcrafting by being able to transmute certain gems for you. You don’t have to have an Alchemist, but it can be very useful. If you’re looking to do JC for the sake of profit and not simply providing gear and gems for your character then you may really want to consider leveling an Alchemist for the ability to transmute lower quality gems into higher quality.

If you’re looking to power-level the profession you can scroll down to the bottom of this post to find a list of items you want to gather beforehand. Be aware though that there are some portions of power leveling it where there are more than one option for what items to craft and there may be a cheaper option available to you. I suggest you follow the guide as needed rather than stocking up on all the mats before hand so that you don’t end up spending thousands of gold on a certain material when you could have spent just a couple hundred on another option.

Jeweler’s Special
There are a couple of things that are special to the Jewelcrafting profession as well, which most other professions do not have. These are Prospecting and Daily Quests.

Prospecting is a Jewelcrafter-only spell that you can train at skill level 20. It allows you to turn 5 of a single kind of Ore (Copper, Fel Iron, Cobalt, etc) into gems instead. The 5 Ore are destroyed in the process and replaced by the gems. Each type of ore has it’s own set of gems that it can turn into, and knowing which ore turns into which gems is the key to making gold as well as the key to leveling up “on the cheap” if you would rather farm your own ore than buy certain gems on the auction house or even worse, farm them from ore node procs alone.

Refer to the following table to find out which kinds of gems you can get from each type of ore.

There are a couple of other types of Ore that you can get from mining in particular zones that are used strictly for quests that I didn’t bother linking above. If there’s another type of ore you’ve found that isn’t on this list you can safely assume that it has no prospecting value.

Trouble Areas
Almost every profession has some sort of bottleneck, or trouble area where the mats are either hard to find or all of the recipes you have access to are either green or yellow and so only have a chance to skill you up. I’ve had yellow recipes that took up to nine attempts before it gave me a single point, and yet I’ve had green recipes that gave me a point every single time I made them. Random numbers suck, but that’s all we’ve got.

One of the early bottlenecks you might find is pretty early on. If you can’t find 20 Small Lustrous Pearls or 40 Shadowgems (or if they’re overpriced) then you might want to take a look at the price of Silver Ore or Silver Bars instead since they can level you through the same range. I find I rarely use Silver in other professions so I end up having a couple of stacks worth sitting in my bank. You’ll see that yourself while you’re leveling through WoW-Profession’s guide, but it’s one you should be aware of for sure since the price of Shadowgems in particular can range anywhere from a few silver to several gold each.

Now, on to some more literal bottlenecks. Large Opal is the first one that comes to mind. While you may find a few while leveling up a Miner, they aren’t all that common overall. The best way to get them is by actually prospecting Thorium Ore, which people don’t really do all that often in general. You might be able to find them on your AH if people have been prospecting ore or leveling toons with Mining, but you might find them way more expensive than you’d like to pay. If you aren’t going to spend time mining Thorium for extended periods of time then you may want to check the prices for Thorium Ore on the AH to see if it’s cheaper. You can get some of them from prospecting Mithril Ore as well, but the chance is much lower.

You can also find Azerothian Diamonds with the same method which can ease up the cost of mats for leveling Jewelcrafting. Some of the other recipes in this level range also require other gems that can be found from prospecting Thorium. Those in particular are a bit easier to find because they also have a higher chance of being mined from the actual Thorium nodes, but it’s good to know where they come from.

If you find that prices for the gems in this particular level range, which is 225-300 or so, then be sure to check the price of Thorium Ore to see if you might be better of buying it than the gems themselves, or give some thought into farming Thorium Ore yourself if you have a Miner who can do so easily.

The next potential bottleneck is Outlands level gems. Typically you can find these for pretty cheap prices on the Auction House, usually less than 1g each or even just 4-5g for a stack of them. You need about 55 of them or so, and it doesn’t matter which type they are. However, you’re going to need to prospect 200 Adamantite Ore to get your hands on the 40 Adamantite Powder you need to finish leveling through Outlands content anyway, so before you purchase those gems you might want to prospect all of your Adamantite Ore and use the gems you get from it first. You do have to have a Jewelcrafting skill of 325 before you can prospect Adamantite Ore, so you may need to buy some raw gems to get you up to that point. The blue-quality rare gems from Outlands sell for 3g each to a vendor, and that’s about all they’re good for too.

The only other bottleneck I wanted to bring up here is going to come at the very end of your JC leveling, which is the new uncommon gem, Nightstone. You need 40 of them to powerlevel, but they’re also one of the gems required for the JC daily quests so they’re often more expensive than the other gems. You can either purchase the gems themselves, or you can buy/farm the Cataclysm ores to prospect for a chance to get them. I had 24 stacks of Obsidium Ore last night and prospecting them all yielded exactly 20 of these. While prospecting is completely random in what it gives you, you can see the percentage chance of getting one is fairly low at a bit less than 1 per stack of ore in this particular example.

Notable Special Recipes
There are only a couple of recipes that you need to keep an eye out for when you’re leveling your Jewelcrafting. There are other options for things you can craft to get past their levels, but you’ll really spend a lot of mats using them instead.

Both of these “special” recipes are for fairly low level crafting, and you really only need to get one or the other unless you can’t find enough of their mats to get through the level range, then it’s beneficial for you to go ahead and get both. The first one is Design: Pendant of the Agate Shield which can be purchased from Neal Allen (Alliance) in Wetlands or Jandia (Horde) in Thousand Needles.

While there are a lot of recipes (usually called “cuts” or “designs”) for other types of gem cuts, the way that gemming works basically nullifies all of the old cuts when new expansions are released. The only exception is twinks, but I haven’t even bothered looking into the twink gem market to be able to tell you how profitable that may or may not be.

Specializations
Jewelcrafting is one of the few crafting professions that does not, and has not (that I’m aware of), had any form of specializations attached to it. Basically, all JC’s are created equal.

However, the high level gem cuts are purchased by tokens that are rewarded for completing daily quests that are only available to high level JC’s. Because of that the patterns for specific gems take time to acquire and not all JC’s will have the same patterns at the same time. Generally you’ll find that casters will start with caster cuts, melee the melee cuts, tanks the survival cuts, and so on. The exception to that, at least early on in an expansion like we are now, is when members of a guild team up in their pattern purchases so that nobody is overlapping and each JC can get a different pattern so that all of the guild’s needs can be met by at least someone, and after those needs are met then they will start to get the patterns they prefer for their own characters or that sell the best on the AH depending on what their motivations are.

So if you’re looking for Strength gems you generally have a better shot finding the cuts you need from Jewelcrafters who are similar classes that also need those same cuts. So Strength-based Plate Tank/DPS will usually have Strength gems, Leather/Mail DPS classes will usually have Agility, DPS/Healing casters will tend towards Intellect, and so on. Like I said, it doesn’t always work that way, but in general that’s what you’ll find early on in an expansion.

Psynister Preferences
Jewelcrafting is one of those professions that I pretty well stick to the guides on. I do break away a few times, particularly when it comes to snatching some cheap skill ups at the beginning of each material bracket up to skill level 300.

The item I’m talking about are the Stone Statues which each require 8 of the different types of Stone found in Azeroth mining nodes, from Rough up through Dense. The stones summon a little statue that sends out a channeled heal that targets you for a few seconds and then dies. The Rough, Coarse, and Heavy versions each take 8 of their respective stones to make and the Solid and Dense versions each take 10 of their stones. They aren’t all that useful, but they do come in handy when they’re needed and they’re fairly cheap to make as well.

If you have a stockpile of these from leveling Mining on one of your toons then you might consider dumping them into these statues for some cheap skill levels since the stone usually sells for crap on the AH. If you don’t have your own, go ahead and check their price on the AH, and if they’re cheap go ahead and get a few stacks if you can skill up on them, but if they’re expensive then just ignore it since they’re not really needed. Making the statues does take a lot of stone, and the statues themselves only stack up to 5 so you’ll fill up your bags pretty quick, but it’s another option that can potentially save you more expensive mats.

There are also two suggestions I’m going to make in particular regarding making gold with this profession. First off, buy every green-quality Northrend gem you find on the AH for 50 silver or less. You can cut all of the Northrend uncommon gems and vendor them for 50 silver if they’re regular cuts or 1g if they proc as a perfect cut. If they’re over 50s each then I don’t suggest you buy them, but if they’re at 50s you’ll at least break even and under 50s you’ve got guaranteed profit. The same concept applies to Cataclysm gems, except that the vendor value for them is 9g each. So if you see any at under 9g then snatch them up, cut them, and then vendor them.

Another item you can make early on that can bring in some decent gold is the Thick Bronze Necklace. It requires level 17 to wear, provides +3 Stamina, and has a fairly low material cost of 2 Bronze Bars, 1 Shadowgem, and 1 Delicate Copper Wire. This necklace is the default choice for all level 19 twinks. Every now and then the market gets flooded with these and they aren’t worth the mats it takes to make them, but if you get your hands on some cheap mats or already have some collecting dust in your bank then it’s a good option for turning it into cash.

Power Leveling Materials List
The following list is taken from the WoW-Professions website. To find a list of what to make with these items you’ll need to refer to their Jewelcrafting Leveling Guide.

Approximate Materials Required for 1-525:

IMPORTANT! DO NOT BUY ALL OF THE MATERIALS AT ONCE! Jewelcrafting is really expensive to level, and on most servers AH is screwed up because of the insanely high prices of low level Gems, Orbs and Bars. I usually have a few tips and alternatives so you can save some gold.

100 Copper Bar
20 Tigerseye or 20 Malachite
120 Bronze Bar = 60 Copper Bar, 60 Tin Bar
60 Shadowgem OR 20 Shadowgem and 20 Small Lustrous Pearl
80 Heavy Stone
30 Moss Agate / 60 Lesser Moonstone for Horde
140 Mithril Bar
80 Solid Stone
25 Citrine
15 Truesilver Bar
5 Aquamarine
50 Thorium Bar
10 Star Ruby
20 Large Opal
10 Powerful Mojo or 10 Blue Sapphire
10 Essence of Earth or 10 Essence of Undeath
20 Huge Emerald
55 green gems OR 40 and 15 Black Diamond – You can find a list of green gems here. Don’t buy all of them from one kind, because there might be some recipes where you don’t have the reputation to buy it, so you will have to choose other green gems. Just buy them when you get to that part of the Jewelcrafting guide.
40 Adamantite Powder (200 Adamantite Ore)
10 Primal Earth
10 Adamantite Bar
Buy around 70 from any of the following gems: Bloodstone, Chalcedony, Dark Jade, Huge Citrine, Shadow Crystal, Sun Crystal. Make sure to buy at least 5 Bloodstone, 1 Chalcedony, 1 Shadow Crystal and 1 Dark Jade, because you will need the Bloodstones when you reach 395 and the other gems when you reach 440.
46 Eternal Earth OR 23 Eternal Earth and 23 Eternal Shadow
5 Forest Emerald
5 Titanium Bar
5 Dream Shard
Buy 45 from any of the following gems: Carnelian, Alicite, Jasper, Zephyrite. I did not include Hessinote and Nightstone in the list, because you will use them later on.
16 Hessinote
40 Nightstone
Note: 495-525 material list is not included, because you shouldn’t buy all of them at once, but you will need around 30 Shadowspirit Diamonds and a lot more Uncommon Gems for the Fire Prism transmutes.